Most professional criminologists have never set foot in a correctional facility. "They've never visited a jail or prison, never worked in one, and they certainly haven't lived in one," says Jeffrey Ian Ross. A criminologist currently teaching at the University of Baltimore, Ross has had opportunities to examine crime from angles most of his colleagues might be afraid or unwilling to.

Born in Canada, Ross earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Colorado, where he did his dissertation work on the politics and control of police violence. He also studied oppositional terrorism (terrorism against the state), before moving over to focus on terrorism by the state.

Who commits crime and why? What would it really take to reform our prisons? Can the state be a criminal? In a recent conversation we discussed these questions and more with Ross.

Ross's first-hand experience with corrections began when he worked in a correctional facility in Canada for over three years, seeing first-hand the troubling prison conditions, the detachment of prison staff and adminstrators from the reality of those conditions, and the superficiality of psychiatric assessments of inmates. Believing that solutions to preventing incarcerated people from falling through cracks in the system were best found in the field of political science, Ross swore he would never again work in or teach corrections. He pursued a master's degree and then a Ph.D. in political science and became an analyst for the U.S. Department of Justice, working on policing issues. That experience was also eye-opening and led him to rethink his earlier stance. When the University of Baltimore offered Ross a teaching position with the caveat that he must teach corrections, he accepted not only the position, but the challenge. The field he'd once resisted became a central focus of his current work.

CONVICT CRIMINOLOGY

Ross recently served as co-editor, with Stephen Richards, of Convict Criminology, a collection of scholarship from criminologists who not only have degrees in their field, but have been convicts, prison activists, or both. The authors use their personal and professional expertise to tackle subjects like the rehabilitation of prisoners, whether prisoners' rights to medical care are being met, and critical issues facing special populations of prisoners, including women, Native Americans, and the mentally ill. First-hand experience is so important to their work that the book's list of contributors details not only the standard information about where each author teaches, but often lists what prisons they lived in and the crimes of which they were convicted (drug offenses predominate). Other authors, like Ross, are not ex-convicts but have enough experience in prisons or with ex-cons to understand their perspective and examine the system critically. Still, Ross notes that even if we spend a lot of time doing prison activism, "as activists we can't even know what really goes on. Generally speaking only correctional workers, convicts, or ex-cons can have a real perspective."

The book and the convict criminology movement developed from the realization that even as arrests, convictions, and incarceration expand at a dramatic rate in the United States, few studies of our criminal justice system propose and implement realistic solutions to deal with convicts and ex-convicts. Most criminologists ignore the prisoner perspective, falling right into step with the majority of society who view anyone in prison as deviant. And that's another reason convict criminology is needed; dismantling myths about who is in prison and why is one of the first steps toward reform.

"It's disingenuous of most 'experts' on criminal justice to speak as experts if they do not have first-hand experience at some level," Ross says, pointing out that "corrections is one-fourth of the criminal justice system." This idea is gaining ground in the world of academic criminology. Though the convict criminology movement is still in its formative stages, and Ross says it will take some time before we really see how these perspectives change the way crime and criminal justice are studied. The "convict criminologists" sessions have high attendance at scholarly meetings, and they have been publishing regularly in journals.

One potential difficulty for the movement is that many of their numbers are "media-shy, and don't want people knowing their past, at least not in their own institutions," Ross says. It's a delicate proposition, writing and teaching from a convict's perspective without letting on that you were ever a convict, for fear of losing the academic position. There have been outings, including that of a Penn State professor who had done time for his role in the deaths of two friends as a young man. That case made the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the media jumped on it. "'Do we want ex-cons teaching our children?' is the media's take on it," Ross says.

Despite the burgeoning of the movement, "most Americans still think that everyone in prison is there because they did something wrong and deserve to be," Ross says. The irony is that so many people in this country are arrested at some point in their lives that many of the people who think prison is for others will end up there themselves. In the course of a year, 23 million people are locked up in local jails. Seven million are in correctional custody and 4 million are on probation--and there are stil others who don't appear in the official statistics. When that time comes, another of Ross's books will be useful. Also co-written with Stephen Richards, Behind Bars is an accessible, practical handbook for people facing time and for their loved ones. The book is filled with informed knowledge about things like how to avoid sexual assault and beatings in prison and how to use your canteen money to put together a meal that contains some nutrients. Cold truths about the legal system are also mixed in: contrary to what you might see in television dramas, in real life even most innocent arrestees cop a plea, because the price you pay in pressure and in prison time for pleading innocent and insisting on a trial is too high. The book is blunt but somehow reassuring. A note of defiance resonates throughout; the reader is often reminded that, if it's at all possible, insisting upon being granted your rights, not snitching or rolling over for prosecutors, is the moral high road.

PRISON REFORM

Ross has very clear ideas about reforming the prison system:

-A certain percentage of correctional funding, perhaps twenty percent, should be earmarked for the education of inmates. Ross says, "research indicates that if a person doesn't come out of prison with a degree, or viable marketable skill or trade they're not going to make it."

-Significant educational funds should also be alotted for correctional officers.

-All prisoners should have access to DNA testing.

-Felons should be allowed to vote.

-Drug-related convictions should be reassessed, and prisons should be purged of people convicted of drug-related crimes.

-Prison watchdog organizations need to be established through government grants rather than having all corrections accountable to the Department of Justice.

-Judges need to be given more discretion in sentencing.

According to Ross, "mandatory sentencing was supposed to equalize sanctions, but ended up making sentences longer and harsher than before, not taking into account individuals. Judges rarely make hard decisions anymore, they just look at actuarial tables."

Troubled by the absence of decent media coverage, Ross calls for major newspapers to have full-time prison journalists on staff. Currently prisons control information coming in and out because they know no one's watching closely. Ross believes reform should happen electorally, with voters electing candidates for office based on their knowledge of and desire to change the criminal justice system. Activists need to pressure candidates to make corrections a priority.

Asked whether he had seen any recent change in public attitudes toward the prison system, Ross wasn't optimistic. There had been hope that the torture of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison would invite comparisons to conditions in U.S. prisons, leading to reforms here, but these comparisons fell on deaf ears. People seemed unwilling to make those connections.

One potentially promising development is the federal government's work on allocating money for DNA testing of all prisoners (though funds are currently not sufficient and are moving at a trickle). The government appears to be more interested in proving guilt than exonerating the innocent, but the results should help people who have been wrongly convicted.

POLICE VIOLENCE and STATE CRIME

Is there more police abuse today, or less? Ross says it's hard to tell, because the data's not reliable. "People are afraid to report it when it did happen, or they report that it happened when it really didn't, to help with their criminal proceedings or their sentence."

Ross was a member of a citizens' review board of police activity in Toronto that seemed effective, though he suspects that in general review boards might just force police to take their actions underground, abusing in secret, or off-camera if they're being filmed. We still don't have generalizable information about the how and why of police violence, though it has been determined in which situations officers are more likely to use violence--not surprisingly, they're more likely to be violent after a chase, if a suspect resists arrest, or if they feel their authority is being undermined, and less abusive if witnesses are present. Officers are now educated about the physical and emotional effects chases might on them, so they can better react. Women police officers tend to be slightly less abusive than men, and officers new to the force are more likely to be abusive than more experienced and confident officers. Studies of the subset of officers who are least abusive found that, in general, these officers have a mastery of communication and read non-verbal cues well. They don't perceive threats when there are none.

State crime as a field of study is very new. By definition, it is crime "by a person who works for a state or agency for or against the state." This could cover corruption, murder, theft, failure to comply with international treaties, human rights violations, and a whole host of other possible crimes. OSHA not enforcing safety laws could conceivably be a state crime. This is such a broad topic that many people are still not comfortable dealing with it as a whole. Political scientists would prefer to look only at political corruption or human rights, for example. But, Ross points out, states never have just one of these problems. They're all interlinked.